


Paths May Cross

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [13]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Dualityverse fic - read the rest of the series first, Each chapter focuses on a different character/team, F/F, F/M, Gen, Interlude, M/M, So some chapters feature ships while others are gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-16 08:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13632960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: The paladins' paths have diverged, carrying them to the far reaches of the universe to train, search for lost loved once, spy on the Empire, and fight back against Zarkon's reign. But no matter how far they may go, the paladins are never alone.A series of interactions and intersections set in the six-month gap between Act I and Act II of Shadows of Stars.





	1. One Day

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read the rest of the _Voltron: Duality_ series, you're going to want to stop and go do that. This fic features a number of OCs and assumes you know basically where everyone is right now.
> 
> If you are caught up, welcome to the Interludes! There will be 8 in total, updating every Monday and Thursday. Chapter titles indicate how much time has passed since the end of chapter 15 in SoS. Enjoy!

“I kissed Lance.”

Matt stopped, hovering an inch off his chair. He’d received an alert from the Red Lion asking him to get on the comms—in private. Allura, Val, and Edi, currently exploring yet another alien city on yet another alien planet in search of a lead, had told him to call if he needed them back at the ship, and Matt had taken off at a sprint without so much as a goodbye.

He had to admit, this wasn’t the way he’d expected this conversation to begin.

Keith sat in darkness on the other side of the screen, ears swiveling toward the hatch at the back of Red’s cockpit. Well, Matt assumed he was in the lion, because he sure as hell couldn’t see anything. He considered Keith a moment longer, then settled himself into the chair.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Congratulations?”

Keith buried his face in his hands, groaning softly. “Matt, _please._ ”

“Sorry.” Matt leaned his elbow on the armrest and plopped his chin in his hand. “You kissed Lance.”

“Yes.”

“He kissed back?”

“Yes.” Keith’s ears laid back. “I think? Wait, yes. Definitely yes.”

“And you like him.”

“…Yeah. I really do.”

Matt nodded. “Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is I don’t know what I’m doing. The problem is I have no clue why I kissed him in the first place. That's not--it's not a thing Galra _do_.”

Matt blinked. “It’s not?”

“No!” Keith spread his arms wide, his eyes glowing with a fevered light. “I’ve been spending too much time in your head. You and Shiro kiss so I just—I don’t know! I panicked!”

Matt tried not to laugh. He really did. But he couldn’t stop himself. “That’s hilarious.”

“ _Matt_.”

Matt sucked in a breath and bit his lip to contain his mirth. He’d never seen Keith look so flustered, his ears quivering a mile a minute as he tried to disappear down the collar of his armor. “Okay, okay. I’ll behave.”

“ _Thank you._ ”

“It’s still freaking adorable.” Keith snarled at him, and Matt held up his hands in surrender. “So you and Lance kissed. Are you dating now, or what?”

“How should I know?!”

Matt wasn’t laughing. He was _not_ going to laugh again. “Well, have you _talked_ to him?”

“About the kiss?”

“I mean, yeah, but now I feel like I need to ask if you’ve talked at all. When did you kiss him?”

Keith turned aside, his expression distinctly petulant. “Yesterday, as we were leaving. And yes, we’ve talked. We kinda had to plan things, and there’s nowhere to hide on a lion. We’re headed for the Galra homeworld.”

Suddenly, Matt’s good humor drained out of him. He thought of the conversation he’d glimpsed inside Keith’s head, of the discomfort and insecurity his mother’s mission had instilled in him. “Oh. Shit. Are you doing okay?”

“Fine.”

"Are you sure? Keith--"

"I'm not doing it for her. I'm..." Keith huffed. “They need help, and we're the only ones who will offer it. I'm not going to do... the rest of it. It's fine, it's--I’m more worried about Lance than about my mom, which I guess is good. Maybe great? It doesn't seem so bad with Lance here. He won't--he won't let me do anything I'll regret."

That was one of the sweetest, saddest things Matt had ever heard, and if they'd been in the same room Matt would have pulled Keith in for a hug. Instead, he settled for a warm smile. "No, he won't."

Keith's lips twitched upward, and he lifted his head "I don’t know, Matt, I’m figuring it out. Just, look, Lance and Thace are scouting this swap moon, and I’m supposed to be doing a sweep of the system to see how many Imperial ships there are. But this is the first time I haven’t been literally five feet away from him.”

“You’re going to have to deal with this eventually.”

“I know.”

Matt shook his head, exasperated. “You’re getting worked up over nothing, Keith. _Trust me._ Lance kissed you back. That’s great! You both want this to go somewhere, so all you have to figure out is where, and how fast. It’s okay if you don’t know that yet, just… be honest with him, then give him a chance to talk, then… take it from there.”

“Very helpful.”

Matt stuck his tongue out. “Talk to him. That’s the first step.”

“And the next?”

“Knowing you? Combust, probably,” Matt said dryly. “On the bright side, Lance will probably be just as embarrassed and awkward as you, so once you’re past that hurdle, you get to try out all the fun stuff.”

Keith’s hands had come up to cover his face, but the golden glow of his eyes peeked out between his fingers. “Do I want to know what the fun stuff is?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, Keith.”

“It’s your mind that put it there.”

Matt… couldn’t really argue with that. “Whatever. You can start with the cuddling and kissing and romantic dinners and, I don’t know, bad pickup lines probably. It _is_ Lance. He’ll probably have some ideas, too. Just relax, enjoy yourself, and see where life takes you. Okay?”

The thin, warbling note that emanated from Keith at that moment said he wasn’t particularly okay, thanks for asking, but he took a deep breath, and that seemed to steady him. “Okay. I should—I should actually do what I’m supposed to be doing right now.”

“Probably,” Matt said. “You’ve got this, Keith. Don’t overthink things.”

"I'll try." Keith gave a lopsided smile as he reached for the button to disconnect. "Thanks for listening to me panic."

"Anytime, Keith. Anytime."

* * *

Matt spent the walk back to the marketplace trying to formulate answers to the others' inevitable questions. He doubted Keith would appreciate Matt spreading the story around, but considering how he’d hooked Matt’s attention, it wasn’t as simple as calling it a casual chat.

Allura and Edi were right where he’d left them, talking to the sages who, rumor said, had sheltered the Pygnarat master for some length of time three years ago. Edi kept glancing at Allura and was doing a near flawless imitation of her regal posture, albeit without the carefully guarded expression.

Val, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen.

Allura spotted Matt at once, her eyes flitting back and forth as though searching for signs of the apocalypse. Matt flashed her a thumbs up, and she relaxed, turning back to her conversation. They soon finished, and Allura hurried over to him.

“What was it?”

“Just a… personal crisis,” Matt said delicately. “Nothing life-threatening. Nothing to do with Zarkon. Keith just needed a little pep talk. Where’s Val?”

At that moment Val herself reappeared through a side door, staring at her portable comms unit like she couldn’t decide whether it was okay to laugh. She looked up, and her eyes locked with Matt’s.

“Lance?” Matt asked.

Val dissolved into a fit of giggles at once, leaning back against the rough stone wall. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, covering her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be laughing.”

But Matt was fighting his own mirth now, and Allura and Edi were staring at them both like they were high. “They’re trying,” Matt said.

“I know. I know!” Val breathed in and bit her lip to halt another bout of laughter. She wiped her eyes. “It’s adorable, and I’m happy for them. But I _called_ this. I _so_ cannot wait until I get to gloat about it to his face.”

Matt snorted, and immediately tried to smother it as he spotted Allura—arms crossed, lips turned downward in a disapproving frown.

Right. They were here for a reason.

“So...” Matt scratched his cheek, fighting down a grin. “Sorry. Did we find a lead?”

Allura remained stern for three more seconds, Edi mimicking her a few feet to one side, before the mask cracked. “As a matter of fact,” Allura said. “We did.”

* * *

This lead took them to a remote planet home to only a few thousand sentient beings, all clustered in the southern hemisphere. The coordinates the sages had provided took them to the north, to a mountainous region populated mainly by flying reptiles the size of a robin and something six-eyed with hooves like goats.

Matt’s heart was pounding as they found a relatively flat expanse on which to land their ship. He hardly dared to hope that they’d finally caught up to the master—but he couldn’t let himself consider any other possibilities. If the old Pygnar had moved on, there would be no one here to point them in the right direction, and if the Galra had already found them…

 _Positive thinking,_ Matt told himself, climbing out of the shuttle behind Allura. They needed this person to be here, so they’d be here. (And if they weren't… they’d figure it out.)

It took close to an hour to navigate the steep, rocky slopes to the specified coordinates, which turned out to be a small, lush valley sheltered between two peaks. A solitary stone structure stood at one end of the valley, and a crystal clear stream bisected the greenery before plunging off the cliff at the far end.

Matt froze at the sight of the valley, hair standing on end. Quintessence hung over this place like a mist, tinting everything cyan and sending a sharp stab of pain through Matt’s brain.

“Vrekt,” he muttered, fumbling in his pack for his Olkari-made lenses. “I’d say we’re here.”

Val stared at him, sympathy mixing with anticipation. “Yeah?”

Matt nodded, pulled on his goggles, and they struck out down the last slope with Allura in the lead. She seemed to be following the strongest flow of Quintessence to where the mist was thickest—a shadowed overhang beyond the stone structure.

An elderly alien sat within, back to the approaching paladins. They looked human at a glance, albeit silvery-skinned. Two arms, two legs. Hands with four fingers. Long, scraggly hair the color of crystals. The figure’s veins glowed with ethereal light, but Matt couldn’t tell if that was only his vision.

_At last._

The voice slipped past Matt’s defenses, settling into his mind before he had time to recognize it for what it was: telepathy, not unlike the sort Red used to communicate.

The Pygnar elder turned, and Matt struggled not to react to the sight of them. They had no neck, and their head was oddly shaped, too flat for Matt’s expectations. Slits like gills fanned in time with the rise and fall of their chest, and instead of a mouth there was only a thin tube, like a fly’s. The alien had no eyes.

Allura, apparently, had expected this appearance, for she didn’t miss a beat as she stepped forward, dropping into a courtesy. “It is an honor to finally meet you, Master,” she said as she straightened. “You were expecting us?”

 _Yes,_ the Pygnar said. _Come. I have much to teach you, and our time is short._

Without further ado, they stood, moving with a rolling, fluid gate, and led the way back toward the stone structure. Matt traded looks with the others, dumbfounded. Allura had warned that the Pygnar rarely trained offworlders in their arts. They’d come prepared to lay out an argument, or even to pay for the right to train under this master.

“I… guess that’s that,” Val said. She spread her hands wide as the others looked at her. “Don’t look a gift teacher in the proboscis, right?”

“Right,” Allura said, squaring her shoulders. “Come. We shouldn’t keep them waiting.”


	2. One Week

It had been a week, and they were almost ready to make the final approach.

“You nervous?” Lance asked, watching the side of Keith’s face as the two of them headed deeper into the crowd at this spaceport—the last pocket of civilization before they hit the homeworld’s airspace.

Keith shrugged, a sharp, jerky motion that did nothing to answer the question. The way he scanned the crowd, hand resting on the hilt of his mother’s dagger, though, Lance didn’t really need words. A few days ago, an excursion like this would have seen Keith unwind for the simple fact of getting him away from Thace.

Not this time, though.

The spaceport didn’t have much of an Imperial presence—a few uniformed soldiers at the customs booth, the occasional sentry standing perfectly still beside the road. Thace said a low-ranking officer ran the spaceport, but her command post was in the opposite direction, and it was easy enough to avoid the rest.

Military presence or no, this was clearly an Imperial holding. Lance spotted a handful of four-armed Unilu merchants through the crowd, a burly Velksan or two carrying weapons flashy enough to proclaim them mercenaries. Nearly everyone else was Galra or part-Galra. They’d found indigo hair dye and purple skin paint at a swap moon five days ago, and with it Lance managed to pass as mixed, at least at a glance. His eyes weren’t quite right, and anyone in the know would recognize his human features in a heartbeat, but there was enough variation in the crowd that Thace, at least, wasn’t worried.

That was great for Thace. _He_ wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout if the disguise turned out to be a dud.

Keith grabbed Lance’s hand. His fingertips and palm were rough with callouses, but the spaces between his fingers, as he interlaced them with Lance’s, were velvet-soft. Lance turned his head, but Keith was looking dead ahead, his quivering ears were the only sign that he knew what he’d done at all. Lance squeezed Keith’s hand, and Keith’s lips quirked upward.

Holy _quiznak_ , that smile. It sent a warm flush straight through Lance’s core, leaving him lightheaded and not a little giddy. The last week had been an adventure in more ways than one, from a flustered conversation the night of his conversation with Val (during which they were both a little tongue tied and ended up kissing again but saying a whole lot of nothing) to the recorded message he’d woken up to the next morning. ( _I like you,_ Keith had said. _A lot. I don’t want to mess this up._ )

They’d both soon remembered how to look at each other without every thought flying out the window—if only because Thace kept forcibly dragging their attention back to the matter at hand—and day by day they’d settled into this… whatever it was.

That didn’t mean there weren’t still moments where it struck Lance, again, that this was actually happening. He’d actually kissed Keith, and Keith had kissed him, and now here they were, strolling the decks of an enemy space station hand in hand.

As first dates went, it ranked ten out of ten for originality.

“I’m not nervous,” Keith said, his voice low. The shuttle service they’d come to check out waited just up ahead, the line curling around the block and disappearing from view. Families huddled together, clutching small bags to their chests. Solitary travelers in ragged clothes clutching knives and clunky laser pistols eyed the crowd around them warily. “I just… I don’t like being back.”

Lance’s heart twinged at the words. He didn't point out that Keith had never lived on the homeworld, so he wasn't really "back." He knew what Keith meant. “But you’re here anyway.”

“Yeah.” Keith pursed his lips, eyeing the line for a moment before leading Lance by the hand around the back of the building. “The people down there on the homeworld are suffering. It’s not right, and--you know what the rest of the universe thinks of us. Who else would ever come help them? I have to do this.”

“And that’s why you’ll never be like Zarkon’s cronies.” Lance leaned over, planting a kiss on Keith’s cheek. Keith froze, even his breathing suspended as Lance smiled at him. “You care too much. You do the right thing even when it hurts. They only ever care about making their own lives easy.”

Keith’s ears laid back, then pricked up, and he wrinkled his nose. “Shut up.” He surged on ahead, toward the door in the back of the building.

“Mmm, nope.” Lance tugged on Keith’s hand, pulling him to a stop, and danced around in front of him. “You don’t appreciate how great you are. It’s my job to remind you.”

Lance counted it a minor victory that he recognized Keith’s expression—wide eyes, quivering ears, tiniest of pouts—as a Galra blush, and he grinned wider as Keith pushed past him, muttering about the mission and getting the information they were here for.

The back room of the shuttle service building was empty, to no one’s surprise. Shuttles from the homeworld arrived on the spaceport hourly, carrying mostly new recruits for Zarkon’s army, who were bustled straight on to waiting Imperial craft. Shuttles _to_ the planet were much rarer, and judging by three days’ worth of observation, the last few hours before departure were a flurry of activity as passengers and shuttle employees tried to get all the paperwork in order. Busy as this station was, there was no one left to watch the back door, which led first to the employee break room and then to a small hallway that brought them to a computer bay.

Lance had been surprised, at first, by the number of people going to the Galra homeworld. Everything Keith and Thace had told him painted it as a shitty place to live.

But it was also a place to disappear, a place Zarkon only noticed for the recruitment drives. A lot of people in the Empire wanted to disappear, it seemed, and the homeworld was one of the few places Galra could go to avoid both the Empire and the hatred it inspired.

Lance kept watch while Keith plugged in a data chip Thace had given him and accessed the computer systems. All they needed to do was find the vectors and authorization codes businesses like this used to get past the Imperial perimeter. Thace had taken the comparatively harder task of infiltrating military flight control to determine a window during which they could approach without any Imperial ships getting a visual on the Red Lion.

“You know, I could say the same for you.”

Lance shot a look at the back of Keith’s head. “What?”

Keith’s hands stilled for a moment, but he quickly went back to work, ducking his head. “I said, I could say the same for you. You don’t appreciate how great you are.”

Heat flooded Lance’s face, and he spun around, staring attentively at the sliver of empty hallway visible beyond the door. “What are you talking about? I know exactly how awesome I am. Have you _seen_ me?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, an overwhelming fondness in his voice. “I just—You didn’t have to come. You don’t have to care about me, or about my issues, but you do, and you’re here, and I--” He huffed, hitting a key with a sharp crack. He appeared a moment later beside Lance, tucking the data chip back into the belt of his dun colored jumpsuit. “I’m glad you’re here. So—thanks. For… for everything. For being you.”

Thank god for Thace's weird purple skin paint, because Lance had to be positively crimson by now. Before he could formulate a witty comeback, Keith seized him by the wrist and dragged him back the way they’d come, and all Lance could do was smile at his stupid alien mullet and revel in the warm, bubbly sensation that had taken root in his stomach.

He’d have to remember to thank Nyma for giving him the kick in the pants he needed, because he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else but hand in hand with Keith, about to storm the very heart of Zarkon’s empire.


	3. One Month

Meri had known it would be hard, venturing back into her past. That fact wouldn’t change, no matter how long she waited, no matter if she broke the process up into shorter sessions scattered across her life like a thousand tiny firecrackers snapping at her soul.

All at once. That was the only way to do it. Like ripping off a band-aid.

She regretted it almost at once.

The first memory to swallow her was an innocuous one—the first time her mother had let her fly their flagship, way out in empty space where she couldn’t crash into a planet or asteroid or fellow traveler, where she couldn’t drift too close to a star or a black hole. The perfect training ground for a prepubescent girl who could barely see over the steering column, but Meri had been too young to feel anything but a supernova’s glow of excitement and pride that filled her to the brim.

When she emerged from that memory, gutted and drowning in grief, she knew she’d made a mistake. Everyone she saw in these memories, everyone she’d known for ninety percent of her life, was dead now. They’d died in the war, or in the fall of Altea; they’d died in Zarkon’s hunt or they’d died in hiding over the following centuries.

They’d lived and died with their fear and their grief and unanswered questions burning at their minds. Had Alfor told his people anything before he died? Had there been time? Or were the survivors of Altea as clueless as Meri to the real cause of the war?

Did they think the paladins themselves had betrayed them? Or did they see cowards who ran when the universe needed them?

Hours passed, and Meri was helpless to stop the barrage of dead faces that lodged new accusations in her chest with every smile, every game, every celebration after a successful trade, a victorious battle, a friendly competition.

That was fine. She wasn’t doing this for herself. She was doing it for Allura, for Coran, for Lance and Val and Nyma. Meri wasn’t naive. She knew she might well die spying on Haggar. The least she could do was leave something behind—and they deserved all of her, not only the pieces that didn’t hurt.

Coran had begged her not to go, first in the secure conference room where she'd announced her plan, then again, wordlessly, in the hangar as she left. She wasn’t sure if he was worried about the spy overhearing or if he just couldn’t bring himself to speak the words, but his message was clear enough either way.

He thought she wasn’t coming back.

Allura had responded in much the same way when Meri finally worked up the courage to tell her. (She’d put it off for more than a week, rationalizing her hesitation away as legitimate concern about the spy discovering her plans, though both Allura’s ship and Meri’s had been given the all-clear by Pidge and Hunk.)

Their reactions weren't surprising. Meri knew too well what Allura and Coran had lost, but they also understood duty, which was why they hadn’t stopped her from doing this. Voltron badly needed insight into Haggar’s plans and the spy on the castle-ship. So, no, Coran’s horror and Allura’s fear didn’t surprise her. Nor did Lance’s farewell. He’d been the one of the few who guessed she would leave quietly, and so he’d cornered her in her room the night before. He said nothing, just searched her face for a long moment, then hugged her tight.

“I’ll be back soon,” she’d whispered, guilt coiling in her gut. “You’ll hardly miss me.”

It was Thace who really surprised her.

Thace, who came with Coran to see her off. Thace, who regarded her with old, sad eyes and exhaustion pulling at his shoulders. Thace, who pressed a bundle into her hands and told her to be safe.

She’d waited until she had a wormhole behind her before she unwrapped the package and found a short, handwritten note atop a data chip and a luxite dagger etched with the Galran sigil for _loyalty._

 _I wish I could offer more substantial aid,_ the note read. _But I burned my bridges when I left the service. I hope these tools will be enough. On the data chip you will find programs to encrypt your transmissions and mask your presence in restricted servers. I’ve also included several ciphers, should you find yourself in need of additional safeguards for the information you uncover._

_More importantly, my knife. Take care with it; Keena doesn’t know that I took it, and she won’t take kindly to the knowledge that I passed it onto someone outside her circle of influence. If you show it to another of our agents, they will recognize you as an ally and aid you as they can—though few are as willing to risk their cover to rectify the evils of the Empire as I was._

_Captain Nadezda ve Drevahl is in charge of Commander Prorok’s security forces on the_ Sentry _. Ulaz drul Erzok is stationed with the Imperial Medical Corps under the supervision of Haggar and her druids, though I don’t know his current location. The two of them are among our best agents, and I consider both friends. If you are able to seek them out, tell them I sent you. I’m sure they will prove invaluable to your mission._

* * *

It took time to infiltrate Zarkon’s army, especially for Meri, who had no credentials to flash, no working knowledge of daily life aboard their warships. She didn’t have months to waste slogging through basic training as a new recruit or the skills to get hired on as a mechanic or medic, but she wasn’t yet so desperate as to see whether an Altean’s ability to direct the flow of Quintessence would qualify her as a druid’s apprentice, or if they would recognize her for what she was and kill her on the spot.

So she stuck to what she knew, using the GAC Coran had provided her to buy a small selection of wares. Her parents had taught her to haggle, and she made a tidy profit off her first round of sales. That money went right back into inventory, haggled down to bare bones and resold at a moderate markup. By the end of the first week, she could pass for a respectable merchant, if one with a small operation. By two weeks, she’d found a couple of black market dealers who supplied her with weapons and other tactical wares.

At three and a half weeks, she made her first sale to the Empire at a small outpost hurting for supplies. They’d declined to pay full price, and if Meri had been an ordinary trader, she would have been outraged at their offer to put her in touch with other Imperial customers as payment.

As it was, she was thrilled, and after scrounging together as many unique weapons as she could find, Meri found herself standing in the hangar of an Imperial warship, wearing the face of an Unilu, her heart in her throat as an officer supervised the trade. Engineers did the actual inspections of the weapons and passed their findings on to the officer, who sat on a stack of crates and picked at her fingernails as the minutes ticked by.

Meri was pleased to see her instincts had been right: the engineers skimmed over most of her stock, selecting a few standard pieces they’d probably strip for parts to repair what they already had on hand. But one weapon near the end sparked a round of excited whispered that were quickly silenced as the engineers noticed Meri’s smile.

Someone muttered, “Q-pulse,” another musing about crowd control, and one of them finally split off to report to the officer, who listened with a bored expression and waved the engineer away before she was finished speaking.

“Two-fifty,” the officer said.

Meri frowned. “Pardon?”

“Two hundred-fifty thousand GAC for the lot,” she repeated, and Meri shook her head. That was almost double what Meri would have considered a fair price--three times what she'd expected the Empire to pay. “I’m not interested in haggling. I’ll buy out your stock and give you a tidy little bonus. In exchange...” She snapped her finger, and one of the sentries flanking the door marched forward, holding out a holopad with a list of weapons and prices listed. “A contract. The things I need and the prices I’m willing to pay. Do well and I might be persuaded to take you on as my personal supplier.”

Meri opened her mouth to ask how long she had to find the items on the list, the but the woman was already headed for the door, snapping at her guards to hurry up. The engineers stared after her, disgruntled, and the foreman’s motions were jerky as he paid Meri.

“What’s that all about?” Meri asked one of the younger engineers as the others began collecting their equipment. The young man was struggling with an energy core, and Meri stepped in to help.

He blew a lock of hair out of his eyes. “What, Sergeant Nahra? She’s always like that.”

“She seems...” Meri hesitated, making a show of adjusting her grip on the energy core as another pair of engineers hurried past with another hunk of junk—not one of they things they’d actually been interested in. “She doesn’t really seem that invested in all this.”

“Why should she be?” the engineer asked. “If she has her way, she’ll be out of here before the end of this rotation.”

“Oh?”

He huffed, heaving the energy core onto a hovercart with Meri. “She’s gunning for a promotion. And if you listen to the rumors, she’s done some, ah, negotiating behind the scenes to make sure she gets it.”

Meri kept her face neutral as she split off from the engineer and helped load up the last of the equipment. _Sergeant Nahra,_ she thought. There might be something there. An Unilu trader would never get anywhere near important information, but a young, ambitious officer about to transfer to a ship where no one knew her?

As she flew away, Meri brought up a still image from her ship’s external security feed and began to craft a shift to match Nahra's features.

An opportunity like this was too good to pass up.


	4. Two Months

Akira flipped through a dozen profiles for a dozen new Guard applicants, a headache building behind his eyes. Here was a Kyrgonian man whose brother had been captured by the Galra two years ago. He’d said in the interview that his brother was almost certainly dead, an ache in his voice that dragged Akira back to the long, lonely nights following the disappearance of the Kerberos mission—but was that all a ruse? What if Zarkon was using the brother as leverage, blackmailing this pilot into reporting back on the Guard’s activity?

Then there was a woman from the planet Mondrigira. After the way she’d lead a team of local fighters to the site of an ambush, saving at least three of Akira’s crew from certain death, she was practically a shoo-in. But was her timely arrival perhaps _too_ timely? What if she was a plant and the entire ambush had been a ploy to win Akira’s trust?

He was being paranoid, and he knew it, but it had been two months since they’d discovered the presence of a spy on the castle, and they were no closer to figuring out who it was. There had been no further transmissions (none that they knew of) and a second sweep for physical bugs had turned up nothing. Coran had looked over Wyn’s scans using the data from Shiro’s arm and the Project Balmera logs, but they’d found nothing.

Pidge had pointed out that they only had the scans of Shiro's arm to compare to, and a baseline of one didn’t inspire great confidence. They were looking for more data from Project Balmera while they waited to hear back from Meri.

None of that did them any good in the meantime. Akira had told no one about the spy, not even Layeni, though she must have begun to suspect something. He asked too many probing questions during interviews, scrutinized the Guard’s performance too closely after a failed mission. He felt guilty for keeping her in the dark, but Shiro had asked him not to speak of it.

Besides, the Guard needed to be able to trust each other. Better for everyone that at least one of their commanders be able to promote that trust with a straight face.

Akira marked his approval on two-thirds of the applications and forwarded his notes to Layeni. He couldn’t be sure none of them was a traitor, not entirely, but he also couldn’t afford to turn down skilled pilots. The Guard had taken on fifty new members in the last two months, most of whom were still in training, and they’d lost three pilots just this week. Employ too much caution and he'd soon find himself without a force to lead.

“Can’t let this paralyze you, Commander,” Akira muttered, standing and stretching his arms above his head. He imagined that was what Layeni would have said, had she known what was on his mind. “Make the damn decisions and _then_ deal with the fallout.” He could plan for the worst—and he _would—_ but he couldn’t let the fear rule him.

A string of Altean characters flickered on one of the screens, and Akira turned toward it, grinning as the translator kicked in and he was able to recognize the signal for an approaching vessel, along with the authorization code that corresponded to the Black Lion.

Takashi was back.

Grinning, Akira switched off the display screens and lights and hurried out of the room, making a beeline for the elevator. Two months had seen no decline in the calls for aid that poured in from all across this galaxy. Akira led the Guard on some of these missions, joined the paladins on others, cleaned up where the fighting had taken a toll but the paladins couldn’t afford to linger.

Akira didn’t know where his brother had been this time; he tackled calls alone as often as he teamed up with Nyma, and sometimes Akira thought Takashi had figured out a way to be in three places at once.

He would need distraction, now that he was finally back on the castle-ship, and Akira was only too happy to provide.

He caught up with Takashi in the corridor outside the Black Lion’s hangar. It had been almost three days since he’d left on this latest mission, and it showed. Takashi’s shoulders were slumped, and his steps dragged as he made his way toward the heart of the castle, already buried in a holo-display that no doubt outlined a hundred new worries.

“You’re _still_ working?” Akira drawled, wrapping his arms around Takashi’s shoulders. Takashi tensed for a moment, then caught himself and forced a smile.

“Hey, Akira.”

Akira frowned as Takashi's gaze flickered back to the reports. “Nope. We’re not doing this.”

“This?” Takashi furrowed his brow, glancing from Akira’s dangling arm to the screen in his hands. He tipped his head back and sighed. “What are you talking about, Akira?”

“This.” Akira went up on his toes to give himself a few more inches of reach, stretching his hand out until he could just tap the corner of the display. “You did this at the Garrison, too. Always wandering around with your nose stuck in a book, or a mission briefing, or whatever. You’re allowed to take a break every once in a while.”

For a moment, Akira was sure Takashi was going to argue that this was _important_ , the same way he always thought whatever he was obsessing over was _important_. The way every little crisis was more important than food and sleep, let alone something as trivial as having fun.

Then he turned, meeting Akira’s eyes. “You have something in mind?”

Akira grinned.

* * *

Alteans didn’t have a concept of paintball. Akira had discovered this early on in his tenure as Commander of the Voltron Guard. There were non-lethal settings in (most) of the training programs, but it was all very serious business using all very serious weapons. He’d considered, very briefly one night while he stared at an unappetizing bowl of food goo, whether the rubbery substance could be dried or compacted into a substitute for paintballs. It was certainly fluorescent enough to make it obvious when someone scored a hit.

The problem with this plan, of course, was that every gun on the castle-ship was energy based. Akira had yet to find a single one that shot a bullet, pellets, or anything of the sort.

That was when inspiration struck.

It had taken time to modify the guns to a low enough power setting, longer still to design vests that would register a hit. Truth be told, Hunk had done most of the work, but Akira had helped as much as he could, redesigning the outer shells to look less threatening and more like his childhood memories. Over the last few weeks, it had become their baby. Hunk and Akira had introduced some of the resident children to the system once they were done with the testing, but that had been little more than an enormous tutorial level. It was about time their laser tag course saw some real action.

Takashi had laughed in delight when Akira led him to the prep rooms. He and Hunk had commandeered an entire floor of Red Tower for the course, setting the lights to a low blue glow and cranking up the strips of emergency lighting along the baseboards and around doors and maintenance hatches. They were still trying to find or design a fog machine to take the whole experience to the next level, but for now Akira was pretty damn proud of what they’d accomplished.

“You’re serious?” Takashi asked, hiding a grin behind his hand as he studied the bulky vest and very real (very modified) laser pistol Akira held out to him.

“Takashi,” Akira said, deadpan. “I never joke about laser tag.”

It took only a few minutes for Akira to outline the game and for Takashi to study the map, including the location of each target. There was so far only one game mode, though Hunk was working on adding special win conditions, and Pidge had promised to find a way to incorporate the gladiators from the training deck.

“These twelve targets will activate in a random order,” Akira said, illuminating them on the display. “You can use the access points--” He toggled the display to show the computer terminals they’d hooked up to the game “--to find out which one is currently active. Whoever shoots it first gets the points. Most points after twelve wins.”

“Easy enough,” Shiro said, securing his vest and testing the weight of his pistol in his hand. “On three?”

Akira hit the switch to start the program and grinned. “I’m not going easy on you. Fair warning.”

“Good,” said Takashi, lifting his chin in a way that was downright cavalier. “That way I get bragging rights when I win.”

A buzzer sounded, signaling the start of the game, and Akira brought his pistol to level at Takashi’s chest, hitting him square in the sternum. The vest flashed red and buzzed, registering the hit.

Akira's stunt won him a look of shock and betrayal and exactly five seconds of safety from Takashi’s inevitable revenge. He didn't waste that time, just turned and sprinted into the maze, cackling as Takashi gave chase.


	5. Three Months

Hunk was exhausted. Physically, emotionally, mentally… The fights just never stopped, and they put Hunk on an endless roller coaster of grief and elation. He and Shay and Yellow had saved thousands—millions—of lives since they’d started tackling calls solo.

They’d also watched thousands of people die. Hunk had dug graves. He’d spoken at memorial services for whole neighborhoods leveled by the Empire. He’d held Shay when she returned in tears from a day spent easing the pains of the injured and dying.

It was never enough.

Today had been one of the good days, at least. He hardly needed the Ativan that he took by habit before every battle. After weeks (months? It was hard to keep track, sometimes) in this sector, they’d finally begun a concerted push back against Zarkon’s presence. Hunk and Shay had answered a call from a self-sufficient space station only to find that forces from three different systems had already formed up around the besieged station.

Yellow’s arrival had been a wrecking ball to Imperial confidence, and the fleet had been routed with only a few casualties on the defenders’ side. No one on the space station had suffered worse than bumps and bruises, and the bulk of the day had been spent relocating its population to safe havens in the system.

That was exhausting in its own way: always somebody ready with ten more questions whenever he turned around, always someone needing an engineer’s advice, or a paladin’s authority, or just a sympathetic ear to help them work through the terror of the day. It was probably a good thing Shay was flying just now, because Hunk honestly might have fallen asleep at the wheel. Yolk. Control stick thingies.

Shay radiated sympathy and quiet amusement, while Yellow wrapped Hunk up in a warm blanket that did nothing to help his drowsiness. He closed his eyes and lost track of himself until Yellow’s paws thudded against the hangar floor, making his stomach swoop as he jolted awake.

“Apologies,” Shay said, smothering a smile. “We are home.”

Hunk yawned and stretched, automatically echoing back Yellow’s contented hum. They’d tried to make it back to the castle-ship every two or three days at first, but things had gotten more hectic since then. Hunk’s moms had made him promise to aim for at least one family dinner every week, and so far Hunk had only missed once.

It was six days this time, but Shiro had told them to take tomorrow off, at least. Hunk barely knew what to do with such a generous vacation.

“Come on,” Hunk said, holding out a hand to Shay. “I’m starving, and Mama said she was grilling pork tonight. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had pork?”

Shay only blinked at him, and Hunk reminded himself that to Shay, his mother’s home cooking was every bit as alien as what they ate whenever they stayed over on a newly-liberated planet. (And Hunk couldn’t complain about any of that—most of it was actually pretty good—it just wasn’t the sort of thing he got cravings for.)

Still, maybe he should see about recreating some of Shay’s favorite Balmeran meals. She hadn’t complained once, but she’d gone without her comfort foods for months now.

Shay hummed as they ambled down the hallway and into the elevator, and Hunk joined in here and there as he caught the not-melody of the Balmera’s song. Shay smiled and leaned her head against his. She seemed ready to fall asleep like that, but the elevator soon arrived on the seventh floor, and she forced herself to stand up and start walking again.

They passed the rec room on the way to the kitchens, and Hunk glanced through the door out of habit, though it was usually empty these days. Pidge and Ryner had only been back once or twice, never while Hunk was there, and Nyma was nearly as scarce.

Shiro and Akira were there now, though, Shiro pacing behind the couch as Akira pressed an ice pack to his head.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Akira grumbled. “Stop fretting.”

Shiro scowled at the couch. “I’m not fretting.”

“You are. I can _feel_ it.”

Hunk’s steps slowed, and he inched forward, heart dropping as Coran stepped into view, carrying several Altean healing patches and a vial of a thick blue-green liquid—painkillers.

“Oh my god!” Hunk breathed, his hands clutching at the collar of his armor as Akira sat up to accept the painkillers. In doing so, he put himself on display. The ice pack was pressed against a sizeable lump on his forehead. Bruises dusted his cheekbone, and his bottom lip was cracked and bleeding.

Akira gave a start, and Shiro turned toward the door.

“Hunk. Hey.” Akira smiled, wincing as Coran grabbed his arm and smoothed a healing patch over a long, angry red cut on his forearm. “What are you doing back?”

“Family night,” Hunk said, numb. Shay had finally circled back to see what had held him up, and she gasped at the sight of Akira. “Are you okay? What happened?”

Akira rolled his eyes and flopped backwards on the couch. “ _Nothing._ ”

“Close call on his last mission,” Shiro said. He stood rigid, his arms crossed over his chest, and Hunk was honestly worried he was going to rip a hole in his sleeve, the way his fingers dug in. “The Galra had an ambush ready—almost like they knew where the Guard was going to be.”

He kept his voice even, but there was no erasing the dark edge to his words, nor the way Coran’s lips tightened. Hunk’s gut churned, and he traded looks with Shay. The spy had been quiet the last few months, not passing along any vital information, so far as anyone could tell. Hunk had just been starting to think maybe the thing on Olkarion had been a fluke.

It was a lot harder to delude himself with Akira looking like he’d gotten on the gladiator’s bad side.

“I’m _fine,_ ” Akira said again, exasperation snapping in every syllable. “A few bruises, a little bump on the head. We already did a scan, and I don’t even have a concussion. It’s not even bad enough to warrant a pod—ask Coran!”

“It could have been worse,” Shiro said.

Hunk dropped his gaze, his appetite fleeing as his stomach swirled with guilt. He’d promised to help Shiro and Coran look for the spy, but his half-formed plans for counter-surveillance tech had gotten pushed aside with all the other missions he had to worry about.

Shiro’s hand came down on his shoulder, squeezing gently. “Don’t worry about it too much,” he said, ignoring Akira’s muttered accusation of, _Hypocrite_. “You should go find your moms. I know they were looking forward to seeing you again.”

Shiro offered a smile, and Hunk did his best to return it. He drifted toward the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot as Shay took Akira’s hand in both of hers. The place where they touched glowed brightly for a few seconds, and Shay looked considerably less shaken when she pulled back.

“He will be fine,” she said to Shiro.

Akira pulled himself up on the back of the couch and gave Shiro a pointed look. “See? Shay agrees with me.”

Shiro pursed his lips, paused, and then relented, huffing out a laugh. “All right, all right. I’m just a little freaked out.”

“A little, he says.” Akira shook his head, then smiled at Shay. “Really, though. It’s family night. Don’t let me keep you.”

Shay finally turned, and with one last look around the room, Hunk followed her out. There had been more injuries lately. One of Pidge’s return trips had been for a laser wound to their shoulder, and Nyma had straight up stolen one of the portable healing units they used mostly for moderate wounds like sprained ankles and second-degree burns. Things that were painful enough, or inconvenient enough, to warrant healing tech, but not so bad that you needed a stay in the pods.

 _This is war,_ Hunk told himself. _People get hurt._

That did little to sooth the storm in his chest as he trudged into the kitchen. His mom was laughing at something Mama had said, and the sound brought unexpected tears to Hunk’s eyes. Dropping his helmet on the counter, he shuffled forward and caught his mom up in a hug that squeezed the air out of her. He didn’t have time to feel sorry for the rough hello, though, for she returned the embrace with just as much force a moment later.

“Everything okay?” she asked, rubbing a hand up and down his back.

Hunk breathed in, blinking away the tears and trying to sound happy. “Just tired. Glad to be home.”

On the other side of the island, Mama shut off the stove with a snap, then reached over and ran her fingers through his hair. “Well, your timing is impeccable. There’s just enough time to change out of that armor before dinner’s on the table.”

“And after dinner,” Mom said, “I can take you down to my lab and show you the fun I’ve been having with physics. Did you know some rooms in this place can reorient their gravitational pull?”

Hunk smiled into her shoulder, closing his eyes to blot out the blood and the death and anxiety’s hands clawing at his throat. “Sounds awesome,” he said. “I can’t wait to see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On a lighter note, Voltron: Duality now has a discord! It's discourse-free, SFW, and you can join your favorite squad, like the Voltron Guard or Mama Holt's Army. Other reasons to join: space catnip, blepping Keith, and Galra Empire conspiracy theories. [Join usssss](https://discord.gg/ySKdjsW)


	6. Four Months

Nyma didn’t quite know how she’d ended up alone in the Blue Lion. Val’s training, Meri’s spy work, and Lance chasing Keith to the Galra homeworld all made a certain amount of sense on their own, and Nyma certainly wouldn’t blame any of them for leaving her. Maybe Meri, _maybe_ , because she’d made that decision on her own, sprung it on everyone, and cut ties within six hours.

(Then again, Nyma was a master of cutting ties, so she really had no room to talk.)

But, no. Nyma didn’t blame any of them. She missed Val, but they’d talked about that trip beforehand, and they still called each other every couple of days just to talk. And Lance, well—Nyma had no one but herself to blame there.

* * *

“ _I dunno, man. Something’s up with him.”_

_They’d been loading Blue up with supplies, Lance sulking down on the lion’s paw and handing rations and medkits up to Nyma, who had contorted herself into one of Blue’s small cargo holds. They wanted to keep the largest bay in her belly clear in case they needed to transport large numbers of prisoners, but they’d already filled up the meager storage in the cockpit, and as it turned out, Blue had lots of little hidey-holes to choose from._

_Lance sighed, his head making a dull_ thunk _as it fell back against Blue’s paw. “Am I being weird about this?”_

_Nyma swung her torso down out of the storage hatch, balancing on her hips and studying him upside down. He’d been moping all morning—since last night’s meeting, actually. Nyma had honestly tuned him out for most of the last twenty minutes. She’d gotten the gist of it: Lance didn’t like that Keith was going off to the Galra homeworld, didn’t like that Thace was the only one going with him, didn’t like the face Keith made when he announced his plan._

_Nyma blinked at him, unimpressed. “Hand me that mobile shelter kit, would you?”_

_Lance shoved himself off Blue’s leg and retrieved the kit Nyma had indicated, passing it up to her. She hauled herself back into the cargo hold, her voice echoing around her as she continued._

“ _You are,” she said. “Being weird.”_

_Lance grunted. “Okay, yeah. I know. It’s just… I don’t think he wants to do this, and I don’t get why he won’t just talk to us. It’s like he wants someone to stop him, except he won’t let anyone talk him down. You know Shiro tried to talk to him about it? Took him forever to track him down, and then Keith spent the whole conversation trying to make a break for it.”_

_Nyma’s sigh sounded bigger than the cargo hold, big enough she could almost imagine Blue was sighing along with her. She swung her feet out of the hatch and dropped to the ground, dusting her hands on her pants. “If you’re that worried about it, why don’t you go_ with _him?”_

_Lance’s head snapped up. “Go with him? Nyma, I can’t-- What about you?”_

“ _I’ll be fine, squirt.” She patted Blue’s paw, and Blue rumbled an agreement. “I’ve got my own backup.”_

“ _And you’re okay with me ditching you?” Lance asked, searching her face._

“ _Oh my vrekking gods, Lance.” Nyma stalked forward, grabbing Lance’s face between her hands. “I was fending for myself when I was younger than you are—and this time, I’ll have Blue and Beezer with me, and the rest of the team a call away. So unless you’re worried I’m gonna steal Blue again--”_

_Lance snorted. “Again?”_

_Nyma tweaked his nose, and he squirmed out of her hold. “Stop second-guessing yourself, Lance, and go woo your sweet damsel.”_

* * *

Admittedly, she’d said what she had, at least in part, just to see Lance’s face. He and Keith thought they were being so subtle, when in reality they were just dense.

But she wasn’t _lying_. She had been on her own for a decade, she did have Beezer and Blue to keep her company, she didn’t mind that he’d gone after Keith. Hell, Nyma was honestly tempted to come with them. She didn’t trust Thace as far as she could throw him, and she didn’t want Keith getting stranded on an Imperial-occupied world.

She wouldn’t want anyone stranded there, but Keith especially. Keith was—he was selfless and reckless and entirely too earnest for his own good. He was the sort of person who’d go and get his own emotions tangled up in this revolution, and then when things went wrong, he was the sort of person to take that loss personally.

He was, as Beezer pointed out after Nyma ranted about it to him, entirely too much like Rolo. And she didn’t want to see him hurt.

“So why didn’t you go?” Val asked. The question felt like it was a long time coming. Maybe that was because Keith and Lance had been gone for four months, their communications sparse and simplistic, and Nyma hadn’t talked about this to anyone but Blue and Beezer.

Nyma shrugged. Curled up in the pilot’s seat, Beezer recharging in the dock Pidge had made for him, Nyma was keenly aware of the silence in the lion. She had an empty seat on either side of her, and she felt the weight of her empty turret overhead.

“Lance won’t let anything happen to them,” she finally said. “He’s good at looking out for people, and the rest of the team needed me here. We’re not getting as many calls as we were at first, but we’re still swarmed with the backlog. Can you imagine if we took another lion out of the rotation?”

Val wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Nyma flipped a hand. “Doesn’t matter. They’re on the homeworld, I’m out here, everyone’s managing just fine. What about you? Feels like forever since we talked.”

“It’s been a _week._ ”

“Feels like longer.”

Val rolled her eyes, but her cheeks were flush with pleasure, and she smiled as she settled into the retelling of her magical field trip with the others. Her master had apparently wanted to give them all some practical experience—which meant a week-long hike through the mountains, no technology to give them a leg up. They’d still had their local comms with them, but by the end of the first day they’d passed out of range of the shuttle, which housed the long-range transmitter. Val had sent off an apology and an explanation of why she’d be out of touch.

From the sounds of it, the week had been eventful, but mostly in non-magical ways. Allura had befriended something Val called a hyxlia and compared to a giant goat (though neither the name nor the description of either creature gave Nyma much of a frame of reference.) Meanwhile Edi had almost gotten swept over a waterfall and Matt had an allergic reaction to the local flora and spent most of the week itching.

“Did you at least learn something?” Nyma asked, amused by Val’s imitation of a tired, itchy, and irritated Matt (and Matt’s indignant protests from off-screen.)

Val shrugged. “I mean, I guess Matt’s learning better control, if he can be in that much torment and still manage to start a campfire without triggering a forest fire big enough to give Smokey the Bear an aneurysm from the other side of the universe.” She grinned as Nyma snorted and leaned back in her seat. “It’s going well, really. I’ll take near-death experiences over _another_ month of meditation and mindfulness exercises any day.”

“They finally let you move on?” Nyma asked. Boredom had been a constant theme in their conversations for the last few months, and Nyma had been getting antsy on her girlfriend’s behalf.

“We still have to meditate for an hour or two every day, but otherwise yeah. Allura’s got a real knack for restorative magic, but she’s still set on learning something offensive while we’re here. Matt’s got his fire thing mostly under control at this point. Even Edi’s starting to get a feel for Quintessence. It’s tough, but she’s pushing through. I’m proud of her, honestly. She’s gonna be a great paladin when she’s older.”

Val ran a hand through her hair. When she’d left, the sides of her head had been shaved down to a fine fuzz, but it had finally grown out—not to where it had been before her captivity, but even with it pulled back into a half ponytail, the new growth curled around her ears and brushed the top of her collar.

“What about you?” Nyma asked. “Any cool new magic tricks to show me?”

A devious grin flashed across Val’s face for an instant, but she quickly smothered it and settled for a one-shoulder shrug. “Eh, maybe one or two. It’s not the sort of thing I can show you over the comms, but—don’t quote me on this, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to show you soon. In person.”

Nyma’s heart leaped. “You’re coming back?”

“ _Don’t_ quote me on that,” Val said, but she was smiling, and Nyma’s heart beat against her ribs with an unexpected weight of longing.

She hadn’t expected to miss Val’s company quite this much, and it was... It was honestly kind of nice to have someone to miss again.

It wasn’t long before Val was called back to training. For once, though, Nyma’s heart was light as she signed off—and Blue was just as excited. Val was (might be) coming home. They opened a wormhole to their next destination—the coordinates of a small Imperial communications hub—and dove into the mission with a roar of adrenaline.


	7. Five Months

Karen’s mind was a haze of white as she circled her opponent. Old bruises and the fresh burn of sore muscles poked at her mind, trying to distract her, but it was hard to be aware of them—aware of anything—when staring down a Galra soldier nearly twice her size.

He moved, quick as lightning, and Karen sidestepped, bringing her arm up into a block she’d practiced a thousand times before. It was different facing a real opponent, the thunder of her own heartbeat loud in her head, but her body remembered the paths she’d worn into it over the last few months. Pain burst across her forearm as she deflected her opponent’s strike—sharp, blinding pain that splashed static across her vision for a brief moment.

Another attack came before she’d recovered, and this time she wasn’t fast enough. Her opponent’s tail swept her feet out from under her, and she went down hard, head spinning.

“Yield,” she said, holing up her hands as Antok’s fist halted an inch from her face.

He held the pose for a moment, then stood and stretched a hand down to help Karen up. She accepted, wincing as she stood. _God,_ she was too old for this.

“You are improving,” Antok said, clapping her on the back with bruising force.

Karen’s breath hissed out of her, and she scowled up at the man. (Damn him for being so tall.) “You wiped the floor with me. Again. And I know you’re not fighting at full strength.”

Antok waved a hand, a distinctly amused rumble entering his voice. “Yes, but you are tiny. You’re doing well, considering.”

Karen sighed. She’d been training with Antok more and more over the past few months as Kolivan got drawn into the final preparations for the launch of New Altea’s fleet. He had his own troops to train up, on top of all the paperwork that came with such a large-scale venture, and he only very occasionally managed to stop by to watch Karen train.

That was fine; Karen had a feeling she’d just disappoint him. Five months had reminded her just how out of shape she was—she’d gone to the gym when she was younger, and she’d kept up with Sam’s fitness routine through the first decade or so of his career, but as her own work became more demanding and her body aged past its prime, she’d gradually cut back. After the first, brutal assessments, it had taken her a month just to stop feeling like her heart was about to give out any time she joined Antok for a session—three before she could even pretend to keep up with his daily routine. They’d only recently graduated from drills to actual sparring.

Honestly, she wasn’t sure she was going to get any better than this. She was almost fifty now, no longer a young woman, and certainly not a soldier. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she’d started on this course—practice with laser pistols, she supposed. Not this close-quarters combat. She was sure it worked fine for Galra and Alteans, both of whom boasted more strength than anyone Karen had ever known.

And they hadn’t even _begun_ to train her with any of their weapons.

“Antok, can I ask you something?” Karen limped to the side of the training room, smiling as Antok offered her some water.

“Of course.”

“Do you think I belong here?”

Antok was silent for a few seconds while she took a drink. His mask made his expression unreadable, as always—Karen had never seen him without it, though they trained together four, sometimes five days a week. But she’d begun to pick up on his body language, to an extent, and the angle of his head suggested he was giving her question serious thought.

“No,” he said at length. “I don’t think you do. But I admire you for doing it anyway.”

His answer cut her legs out from under her as surely as his last attack, and she huffed out a pained laugh. “I suppose I walked right into that one.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Antok said. “You are a warrior in spirit, and you have come a long way. If you are ever needed in the field, you will be an asset. But you do yourself a disservice in trying to fight the way we do. We rely on stamina and strength that your species simply does not possess—that’s no mark against you, but it would, perhaps, be beneficial if you were to train with someone whose strengths align more closely with your own.”

Karen pursed her lips. “You’ve already been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

Antok ducked his head, almost abashed. “We will be heading out soon, Kolivan and I. The paladins need our support if they are to expand their circle of protection beyond its current bounds. You will be changing instructors in any case. I see no reason why you should not take the opportunity for a change in tactics.”

“You have someone in mind?” Karen asked.

“I do. I still need to speak to her to see if she is willing to teach you. Assuming she is, I can have her call on you later, if you wish?”

Karen nodded, rolling her sore shoulder. “That sounds fine. In the mean time, I think I’m going to head home and ice some of these new lumps.” She couldn’t stop a hint of irritation from entering her voice, but Antok only laughed. His hand enveloped her shoulder, and he nodded to her.

“It has been an honor training you. May we meet again.”

She smiled, reaching up to pat his hand. “It’s been an honor, Lieutenant Antok.”

* * *

“So I was talking with Akira.”

Karen winced as Eli dabbed a bit of healing ointment on her elbow, where she’d received a nasty scrape—probably from her last tumble. She forced herself to relax, leaning back against the cold packs she had wedged between her and the armchair she’d collapsed into upon returning home.

“About your videos?” Karen asked. She’d been too busy with Antok to know much about Eli’s latest project, but he was still up staring at the computer screen each night when she went to bed. Akira had sent him more interview footage, she thought. They seemed especially focused on the Guard this time around.

Eli pressed a bandage to the scrape, then sat back, and Karen poked at the bandage. It wasn’t quite like a bandaid—it didn’t have distinct pad and adhesive areas. Rather, it was made all of a single material that stayed in place without seeming to really _stick._ At the least, it didn’t pull at the wound underneath.

“Yeah,” Eli said. “We’re almost done with the next one. Just trying to strike the right tone—you know, be honest with people about what it means to be a Guard without scaring them off; let them know how to help without coercing them. It’s harder work than I thought.”

“The Guard’s still growing, though?”

Eli stood, arching his back, and dropped onto the couch behind him. “Yeah. The first batch of recruits are officially out of training now, and the second’s close. That’s almost a hundred ships between the two, with another hundred in training.”

Karen whistled. “That’s nothing to scoff at.”

“Not at all.” Eli raised a cup of coffee—part of a dwindling supply he’d brought from Earth—and took a sip. “They’re handling more and more missions alone now, but they’re still less… well, less invulnerable than the paladins. Akira’s done everything he can, but there’s no stopping casualties altogether. That’s what we were talking about, actually. He’s got a pretty steady stream of pilots signing up, and more local fleets and minor rebellions looking for alliances. What he’s really hurting for right now are mechanics to repair the fighters, engineers to improve them—heck, people to build _new_ ones. The castle’s got the equipment they need to replaced lost ships, but it’s not an autonomous system.”

Karen hummed thoughtfully, leaning her head back against the cushions. She felt wrung out, her head in a fog after the morning’s training. Sparring was still beyond her, and sparring against Antok was worse than most. “When do you think you’ll be ready to put it out?”

“Another week or two,” Eli said. “I’ve got a few additions to make, and then I’ll have to play with the sequence a little. But we’re getting there. Then it’s off to the races with the second round of ‘Meet the Lions.’ Shiro says they’ve almost stabilized the region our first video went out to. With the Guard up and running, New Altea almost ready to launch, and all the other allies they’ve gathered, they’re just about ready to run this again, but on a larger scale.”

Karen’s neck prickled. She’d talked with Shiro herself a few days ago. They hadn’t run into any major snags with their allies yet, but it was still a very loose network of friendly planets and cooperating forces, to say nothing of the dozens of worlds trying to stay out of the conflict. The Voltron Coalition was still a long way from reality—and before it could be realized, they were going to need to draft a treaty.

It was sitting on Karen’s computer right now, scarcely more than a bulleted list of points she wanted to cover. She hadn’t had the mental focus to develop it beyond that.

She had to make that a priority again.

Just then an alert buzzed, indicating a visitor at the door. Eli started to stand, but Karen waved him off. “That’ll be Antok’s friend,” she said. “The person he wants to train me after he leaves.”

With a groan, she forced herself to stand and cross to the door. Hopefully this person wouldn’t expect Karen to dive right into the deep end. After her session with Antok this morning, she was going to need a few days’ recovery.

The door slid open, and Karen instantly tensed, an automatic resentment seeping into her bones.

“Hello,” she said, forcing a smile. “Are you Antok’s friend, then? I don’t believe we’ve officially met.”

The Galra woman on the other side of the door smiled, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. The hair was dyed an offensive shade of magenta, and if not for the gray in her fur, Karen would have taken her for a teenager going through a bit of a rebel phase. Even her clothes were sloppy—a short skirt that might not have been leather as Karen knew it but certainly gave off the same impression, a faded red shirt with a ragged hem, and some sort of cropped gray biker jacket with indistinguishable designs drawn on the cuffs in strata of half-faded black ink.

“I don’t believe we have.” The woman crossed a hand over her midsection, hesitated, then held it out for Karen to shake. “Keena. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Karen’s smile felt strained, and she tried her best to forget Matt’s distaste for this woman. Harder to forget were the snatches of conversation Karen had overheard in Council Hall. “Likewise.”

“You look beat,” Keena said, her voice still impossibly chipper—and a far cry from the understated threat she’d used when talking about Keith. “So I’ll keep this quick. I just wanted to stop by and introduce myself. Start off on the right foot, you know? After all, we’re going to be spending a _lot_ of time together.”

“Right...”

Keena’s smile widened just a fraction, a predatory gleam entering her eyes. “Anyway, I’ll leave you to your recovery. See you first thing in the morning?”

It had the sound of a challenge, and something primal and _angry_ in Karen refused to back down. “Of course,” she said. “See you then.”


	8. Six Months

“All right, we’ve got about five more minutes before the security system resets and we get swarmed with guards,” Pidge said. “How are you doing with the evacuation?”

“At the last detention block now,” Ryner replied, ever-so-slightly out of breath. She and her small team of Guard pilots had already cleared one wing of the prison facility, ushering freed prisoners to a Guard shuttle then diving back in to clear the other wing. “We’re cutting it close, but we should be fine. Will you be out in time?”

Pidge glanced up from their screen, eyeing the progress bar that marked the file transfer. "I hope so." For as small as this place was—just the two wings, fewer than forty prisoners in all—it had a staggering number of records. Pidge could only assume that meant a high turnover rate. Maybe this place was a kind of temporary holding for new prisoners before they were shunted off to labor camps, druid experiments, or higher security facilities elsewhere in the Empire. Maybe people just died here.

Pidge desperately hoped it was the former, and not only for the sake of the faceless masses who had passed through here. There was a chance their father had been held here, and they couldn’t stomach the thought that he might have died months ago.

They shoved those thoughts away, along with the pressing awareness that they’d already hit two of their four targets, only to come up empty handed. The last half a year had been hectic start to finish, a million worlds in desperate need of help. Some missions were done in just a few hours, but more and more they were running up against places where the Galra had dug in, and even with Guard backup, it took Pidge and Ryner days, if not weeks, to clear these places out.

There was still one more prison to hit, though. So even if they didn’t have any luck here--

“Don’t think like that,” they muttered, clicking through the base’s security readouts one more time while they waited for the last few files to transfer. Pidge had come in quiet with Ryner and Klysta—one of the Guard’s tech experts. Together they’d managed to set off a series of false alarms that herded most of the staff away from the cell blocks and sealed them behind blast doors. The sentries on board were all out of commission, and Pidge had sent everything they could think of to deter the guards’ attempts to break free.

Klysta and a second Guardsman waited just outside the command room where Pidge was set up. They shouldn’t need the backup, but it was nice to have a little more firepower on their side, and Akira had been working himself to the bone over the last few months to get the Guard to the point where it could spare these small squads. Pidge wasn’t going to complain.

At last the console chimed with the completion of the transfer, and Pidge breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, I’m finished,” they said, disconnecting from the terminal and gesturing for the two Guardsmen to follow. “On our way back to the extraction point.”

“I’ll be there in about thirty seconds,” Ryner said. “Prisoners are away.”

Pidge grinned, clutching their bayard as they ran. There shouldn’t be any trouble—not for another few minutes—but they’d learned not to be overconfident. When it was just them and Ryner, they had to be ready for everything.

But today was one of the good days, and Pidge and their escort were already to the hangar by the time the overhead lights flickered, indicating the system had reset. Green crouched just inside the shimmering atmospheric barrier, and she lowered her head as Pidge and the Guardsmen sprinted forward.

“Three on board,” Pidge called, pausing just behind Green’s teeth to catch their breath. The mouth snapped shut, and the floor lurched as Ryner took them out. Reports from the Guard shuttle and the three fighters trickled in, and then they were away, a peculiar lightheadedness telling Pidge when they’d entered the wormhole back to the Castle of Lions. Coran and his staff would take care of the refugees; they’d gotten all of Yellow Tower up and running specifically to house the people they rescued while they healed, rested, and figured out where they wanted to go next.

Pidge left them to it; as soon as Green touched down in her hangar, Pidge was out her mouth and jogging over to their workstation by the wall. They had a new treasure trove of data to mine, and they weren’t about to waste time.

* * *

They found nothing.

Oh, it would still be useful, sure. Just like the data from the last two prisons had been useful. Pidge had a couple of solid algorithms going by now, one to analyze the administration of Zarkon’s prison system—how these places were staffed, who was held where and why they were transferred, security protocols, emergency procedures, and the like—and one to construct a map of Imperial prison ships, holding centers, and labor colonies.

There were already dozens of coordinates marked on this map, and Pidge was all too aware of how many they must be missing. The prison ships they’d identified so far usually held fewer than a hundred prisoners; the holding centers even fewer. Mines, factories, and other labor programs might have a few thousand, but that still didn’t make a dent in the millions of people that had to be lost in Zarkon's prison system.

So, sure. The data was being put to good use, and before the war was over, Pidge expected it to have contributed to hundreds, if not thousands of rescues.

But they’d found no trace of their dad.

“Don’t give up,” Matt said, leaning forward as Pidge slumped in their seat. It was late, and the castle had dimmed its lighting for the night cycle, but Pidge was still wide awake, red-eyed and frustrated as negative result after negative result stared back at them. No mention of Commander Samuel Holt by name, species, or prisoner number. No reference to the coordinates corresponding to Kerberos. No references to Shiro or Matt or Project Balmera or its predecessor, CORE.

“I’m _not_ giving up,” they snapped, glaring at their keyboard and willing the tears away. “There’s still one more prison on my short-list, and I’ve been thinking about ways I can fine-tune the algorithm I used to identify them. I’ve got more data now, so that should help me narrow it down.”

 _Should._ That was they key word, the knife that kept plunging into Pidge’s chest with every ragged breath. This was all guess work. Even with all the data in a dozen systems, they were still throwing a dart at down a mineshaft and hoping they hit the target at the bottom.

Matt sighed, and Pidge finally looked him in the eye. His face was finally filling in again, losing the sharp angles he’d had when he first returned home. The crystal scars hadn’t disappeared with his training, but they didn’t stand out as much now—or rather, they stood out more, their cool blues contrasting with a face that had more color these days. But they didn’t look so frightening when everything else about him looked healthy. Almost like something he’d done just to look pretty.

The thought brought a shadow of a smile to Pidge’s face, and Matt raised an eyebrow.

“Just thinking about you wearing body glitter,” they said.

“Sounds like there’s a story there.”

Matt gave a start as Val entered the frame, her hair pulled back into a stubby little ponytail. The time away from the war had done her nearly as much good as Matt, and Pidge found it hard to be upset with either of them for being gone so long.

“Hey, Val,” Pidge said, offering a smile.

Val’s smile faltered, then turned melancholy. “No luck, I take it?”

Pidge dropped their gaze. “Not this time.”

“You’ll get there,” Val said. The way she said it, full of unshakable confidence and an undercurrent of raw energy, sounded just like Lance, and Pidge found themself breathing a little easier just for hearing it. They looked up, and Val flashed a thumbs up. “Think of it this way: now you know one more place your dad _isn’t_. So you’re getting closer to finding him, even if it feels like you aren’t.”

“I guess so.”

"That... probably doesn't help much, does it?" Val sighed. “I wish I step through this screen right now and give you a hug. But, alas, I haven’t mastered that trick yet.”

Matt choked on what might have been a laugh, and he turned aside, coughing into his hand as Val smacked the back of his head. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a weird mental image!”

“Matt. Have you _seen_ us lately?”

“I’ve seen more of you than I want to, honestly.”

Val’s jaw dropped open, and she snatched up a pillow from the floor and swung for Matt’s head. He ducked, lifting his arms to shield himself, and grinned wider. “Take that back, Holt,” Val said, trying and failing to smother a smile.

“I would, but my mom told me not to lie in front of Pidge. It sets a bad example.”

“How’s _this_ for an example?” Val cried, raising the pillow in both hands and raining a flurry of blows down on Matt’s head as he roared with laughter and tried to contort himself over the back of the chair far enough to avoid the assault.

Pidge just shook their head, pulling their feet up onto their chair. Behind them, Green crooned a soothing song that tempted Pidge toward sleep. There would be more people to rescue tomorrow, and more after that. It was getting hard to hold onto hope, but for now, Pidge would borrow a little bit from Matt and Val to keep them going. Just a little longer. Just until they found more time to break away and hit the fourth prison.

Their dad would be there. He had to be.

And if he wasn’t, they’d find somewhere else to look. They weren’t going to stop. Not now, and not ever. They were a Holt, and Holts never gave up.


End file.
